The world that Paula Deen grew up in

A friend of mine introduced me to Food Network star Paula Deen some years ago. I had watched a lot of cooking shows on the network but had never seen hers.

So I looked her up, and what I saw was a gray-haired white woman who had assumed the mammy stereotype role that the South had long ascribed to black women. She was overweight, talked too loud and worst of all, she cackled – not laughed but cackled, incessantly. Her Southern accent was so thick that it sounded fake.

The only things missing were the red kerchief on her head and the apron.

One of four sheets of rhymes using the N-word. It is typical of how African Americans were portrayed and defined in the society that Paula Deen grew up in.

When I learned that Deen dumped pounds of butter in her recipes – ignoring how bad it was for people’s health – I was even more done with her.

If Deen had been black, I would have cringed at the role she was playing. As a Southerner – I live in the North now but I will always be of the South (with all it warts) – I found Deen’s style an affront to women. She and Miller Gaffney of South Carolina, a star on the now-defunct PBS show “Market Warriors,” were the ultimate stereotypes of what people believed southern white women to be. And so it was upsetting to see both of them unabashedly playing up that image and their native tongue.

Deen seemed to have taken a southern black stereotype, put her own brand on it and made millions of dollars ($17 million, according to one account). She had made it her own in much the same way that black folks are told to do with words and phrases that have been used to denigrate them.

Paula Deen has admitted using the N-word in the past, but not anymore. Photo from the Food Network website.

While Deen exploited the role of the mammy to make money, she may have not gotten too far away from the roots of her southern childhood that attached derogatory labels to black people. A daughter of the South, I’m sure she grew up in a world where the N-word was used so often that she and children like her considered it a surname for all black people. But that atmosphere was not limited to the South; it was ingrained in the whole country.

Deen admitted using the N-word in a deposition for a lawsuit filed by one of her employees, who accused her and her brother of racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Her using the word did not surprise me. What I found surprising, though, was that she admitted applying it to a black person.

“But that’s just not a word that we use as time has gone on. Things have changed since the ’60s in the South,” she said, according to an NPR storyof questions and answers from the transcript of the deposition.

Her lawyer has denied the accusations, which were first released in a story in the National Enquirer, and said that Deen does not condone the use of the word or others like it. Her company issued a statement that she had used the word but in a different time in history.

Three sheets of a rhyme using the N-word.

Deenwas born in 1947 in Albany, GA, and grew up during a time when books, toys and dolls presented black people derogatorily, and society treated them just about any way they wanted to – and got away with it. A friend of mine’s husband hated white people until the day he died because a white man kicked him in the face for no reason at all when he was a child.

On the auction tables, I see the remnants of a period before, after and beyond Deen’s birth that was infested with an insidious racism that left its imprint. Here are some examples from auctions:

Four sheets containing a song about four black men who dwindled down to one through mishaps. It was written in the format of “Ten Little Indians,” a stereotypical version of which was the original title of an Agatha Christie mystery with the N-word. At the top of the sheets were men in colorful costumes. There was no date on the sheets. At the auction, an African American vendor quietly asked if I were going to bid on them. No way, I said, and I assumed that he would. A week later, a white seller of antique glass asked if I had seen them, and we both agreed that they were simply awful.

A Cream of Wheat ad with a World War I theme.

The ubiquitous Cream of Wheat adsthat one auction-goer pointed out to me recently with the black chefas servant. The ad was on the flip side of the cover of “The Etude” magazine, where you could always find them, he told me. And there it was, a constant reminder of the perceived subservience of black people.

A book of Southern rhymes, whose drawings included a heavy-set black woman selling fish, with a kerchief on her head and lips painted red.

A black and white print titled “Blackbirds” of a bare tree with little naked black children sitting on the branches. It’s a difficult image to look at.

Deen is not the only one who’s used the N-word (and still do), and I don’t mean just white people, either. We all know that rappers used it like it was a substitute for the world “the.” I have a cousin who peppers his Facebook messages with the word. Every time I see it I bristle and wonder if it ever occurred to him that it might just be offensive to some of his Facebook “Friends” like me. (Note to Sherry, tell him that it is).

But he’s not Paula Deen. He doesn’t have a national platform where he can influence people, but he does have his own little private world where he does.

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Our houses are filled with memorabilia and artifacts that are part of our family's history and legacy. But far too often we don't know what we have or assume it's worth very little or nothing.

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About Sherry Howard

I started going to auctions to fuel my love for African American art – but at a bargain. I love the old masters: Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith. I wanted to find their works and discover other veteran artists whose works may have been hiding in an attic or basement, and forgotten.

I’m a journalist by profession: I was a newspaper reporter and editor. Now, I’m taking what I did as a journalist – peeling back the covers of people’s lives and writing about what I found – and applying it to auctions. And I’m loving it.

Visit me often to see what I come up with. I would also like to share stories and photos of what you find and your collections. Click my Contact page.

What is my stuff worth?

Here are some tips for things you can do on your own to help determine what your items are worth:

First, try the web. Search for items similar to yours.
Go to the library or browse at a bookstore. Look through price and collector's guides pertaining to your item.
Get a free or reduced-price appraisal. Find local auction houses in your town and check their websites to see if they offer these quick appraisals. You can find auction houses near you via auctionzip.com.Pay for a real appraisal. This could be your last step or your first step (if you have an item that you already know is valuable).

You can get more detailed information on each of these tips in my blog post on the subject.